


Woe Be Gone

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Multi, many different faces of love, málaga 1999, to the good old days but also not, with many flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29737752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: In her darker moments, she used to wonder if Yusuf and Nicolò wouldn’t be better off without her.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 52
Kudos: 131





	Woe Be Gone

The way that age comes and goes in a life—she would never be as old again as she was today, and she might live many more millennia. Half the time, in this life, you wouldn’t know where you are, or when. Noise and consternation everywhere. The years were rolling out like the tide, she had old weather on her face, on the hard line of her jaw. The world was on the cusp of another millennium, turning to begin the long, slow slide into new light, and she couldn’t fucking bear it.

So she left in the middle of the night. After the Helsinki job. There was nothing rational about it or even entirely sane. She just got in the car and drove until she ran out of road and then she climbed into the sky. Airplane to somewhere. She hadn’t said goodbye or left a note. She drank and she drank, and she kept moving, across strung-out skies and dreary airports.

When she rose up to herself again, alone, it was in the Spanish port city of Málaga.

She took a room in an old pension and huddled on the bed, swigging from a bottle of vodka and shivering violently. It was so cold she could feel her blood move. She must have looked like shit passing through, because the pension owner, unbidden, knocked at the door and gave her a single fat orange and four paracetamol and said she hoped she’d feel better soon. It was the most perfect orange she’d ever seen. It glowed like new love; it glowed like Joe and Nicky.

Those were her blue nights in Spain. She slept mostly by day, and when she dreamed it was of desert places. She wanted to go and lie on a cold desert floor in the evening amongst the flowers of dusk—the dull amethysts, the quiet rubies—and let her blood flow to feed them.

One night she finished the bottle that was before her and pulled the covers over her head, wondering if she could remove all the hooks of sentiment from herself, the hooks that grappled on the softest parts. Briefly, she pictured herself as a small woodland animal turned over to reveal its soft white belly, and wondered if that was what she had come to.

She preferred to treat her memory as a graveyard. Segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of exhuming or reviving them. But sometimes memories sprang to life unbidden. She thought about how she and Quynh used to argue. Their screaming fights and jealous rages. Yusuf and Nicolò had learned to quit the vicinity during those eruptions. Things were particularly unsettled during what turned out to be their final years together as a foursome, when they lived in a too-small croft on the far northwestern periphery of Europe. The sunsets were biblical out there. If she and Quynh were having a civil day, in the evening the four of them would walk along the end of the peninsula and watch the sky fill up with the blood of heaven and say goodbye and good fucking riddance to the day. 

Occasionally there would come a reprieve. She conjured up a memory of the four of them lounging in the heather and thistle of a rolling Scottish hill, just a sweet nothing day, Quynh in her arms, Yusuf with his head in Nicolò’s lap, all of them drunk off sweet wine. Then the rain came like a sudden attack from an irksome old god and they scrambled away as the sky changed color—quick as love can change—and there was rain on their faces and everything was giddy and they were collapsing with love.

It was too cold to just lie there. She got up and went out to the night and the streets. There was an atmosphere of old mystery in the city, a tangy resonance on the wind. She walked the turns of the Jewish quarter under a scimitar moon and found the one bar that never closed for the night. She sat at the tile counter and ordered a white rum. The barman who served her looked stoned as a fucking koala. _Whatever he’s on, I want some._ There was a gaggle of early-morning workers girding themselves for the day ahead—a few cops and a set of stout, short-legged postmen drinking coffee with condensed milk and brandy. She tossed back her rum and asked for another.

When the sun came up, she went for a hike in the hills above Málaga. A jet from the army base screamed overhead. A hotel they might have stayed at once, a few decades past, was chained up now, its windows blind. Far below, the blue sea trembled and broke up; the lights of the city swam. She found her way to a bar in a mountain village. She picked at a ración of tortilla and drank cortados and Jameson whiskey. A television played high and silently in the corner, some old football match. When the sun had passed its zenith, she walked the five miles back down to the city. She found a bench in a plaza and sat, wondering how much time she had left.

With her shit luck, probably too much.

The moment seemed to flicker and glow, and the past became unstable. Ghosts traipsed across the plaza; they idled in doorways with their stories of old love. In the distance, the sea was the color of iodine, and god, she thought, this place was so haunted. There was a sadness, too, close in, like a damp second skin.

The aura of bad luck had been everywhere at the end; it surrounded them like a nervous village. The wind blew bad luck in swirls around their feet. Bad luck, bad luck—the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. Those final years in Britain were disastrous for them. She and Quynh had never been faithful, never tried to be, but suddenly they were punishing each other for it. Yusuf and Nicolò took the collateral damage. Yusuf stopped painting, hardly sketched, and his poetry dried up. Nicolò didn’t just stop singing; he nearly stopped speaking altogether. The four of them were consumed with fatalism, unhingedness, morbid introspection. They were shivering in the chilly damp and hearing voices they had no business hearing. Everything was grey. And Quynh—

Yusuf and Nicolò emerged from the sideway. They strode briskly across the plaza, dark cloaks swirling around their legs, hoods pulled low over their faces.

No, impossible.

She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them: the old times shifted again, rearranging like fault lines. Yusuf and Nicolò were still coming, but now they were Joe and Nicky, striding briskly across the plaza, dressed in dark jeans and leather jackets, hoods pulled low over their faces. They were in perfect sync with one another, their long legs covering the distance in no time at all.

They’d always been so different from Quynh and herself. The boys, the men. At first they’d appeared like children to her. They still believed in their gods; they observed strange fasts and prayed at odd hours. The unfettered way they gave of themselves to each other seemed exorbitant. Later she came to suspect that they knew something she and Quynh did not. Yusuf and Nicolò were their own cosmos, self-contained and self-sustained. Even when they weren’t getting along, when one or both was in a temper, when there was no privacy, when they fled the room because the sight of her and Quynh calmly and meanly fucking each other on a rug thrown across the floor was more frightening than arousing—

“Hey, boss,” Joe said, plopping down beside her. Nicky settled noiselessly on her other side.

“You motherfuckers,” she sighed. “How’d you find me?”

They exchanged a glance. “We just knew,” Nicky said.

“Where’s Book?”

“We left him in Paris. The two of you have a tendency to… enable each other, sometimes,” Joe said.

“Jesus, Joe.”

“You didn’t leave a note,” he said, a little reproachfully.

“What does it matter? You found me anyway.” _You always do_ , she added silently.

Yusuf and Nicolò hadn’t been there at the end. They had gone away to—to save themselves, to save each other, to save their relationship, she didn’t know. Maybe they were steered by a force outside of themselves, steered on the drag of starlight away from the brittle greys of Britain to the vaunting yellows of Malta. She and Quynh had made their lives pretty fucking unbearable; they were right to go.

So they had not been there when Quynh was taken. It was already too late when dreams of fire and burning, of water and drowning, brought them back to Britain. They rescued Andromache, but not all of her, not the piece of her that sank to the bottom of the ocean with Quynh, and now, centuries later, they were still trying to recover that lost piece, despite the obvious futility of the exercise.

Certain kinds of self-flagellation were only possible when you were hundreds or thousands of years old.

“I’ve learnt a new word in English.” Nicky broke the silence. “ _Woebegone._ Pretty, no?”

She almost smiled. “I thought you fucking hated English, Nicky.”

“Oh, believe me, he does,” Joe said.

“It sounds like an invocation for woe to be gone,” Nicky said. “But when I looked up the etymology, I discovered that it actually stems from a Middle English phrase, ‘wo begon,’ meaning ‘beset or surrounded by woe.’”

“Are you calling me woebegone, Nicky?” she asked, less amused now.

He gave her tiny, cryptic smile.

“I’m not fucking woebegone,” she said.

In the decades they spent searching for Quynh, the three of them moved in the sequence of a disturbed dream. She couldn’t remember much. The sense elements that were most vivid in her memory—the briny tang on the wind as they stood on the beach, the cathedral stone that was hot to the touch in the morning sun, the migraine whine of gathered voices at vespers—did not amount to a consciousness of that time but merely created a texture of it. Yusuf and Nicolò made all the decisions. They tracked down leads and followed them to the ends of the earth. Every man who was on board that curst ship. It all came to an end here in Málaga, in sixteen-hundred-something. They were pursuing their final lead, the last surviving crewmember, the cabin boy who was now an old, old man. He was a withered husk, nearly senile; he couldn’t even remember his own name, let alone the location of the iron coffin dropped into the sea. It was probably a mercy when Nicolò slit his throat. She hadn’t wanted to give him an easy death.

She studied Yusuf and Nicolò. Strange breezes moved across their faces. Yusuf, all the light gone from his smile, his handsome features set in a waxen mask of suffering, shoulders hunched against decades of sorrow. Nicolò, so beautiful he’d bring a tear to a glass eye, growing more austere with every passing year, turning into stone.

She knew what decision she had to make.

And they saw it on her face.

Yusuf argued. He insisted that they would continue the search, whatever it took, no matter the cost, they would not rest until Quynh was found.

Yusuf talked for a long time, and when he was done, she turned to Nicolò, who had not said a word. He didn’t have to. Gently he touched her arm, and even in her grief she could see the terrible love in his eyes.

“I’m not fucking woebegone,” she repeated.

“Of course you’re not,” Joe said soothingly.

Nicky just looked at her with his calm, medieval eyes and said nothing. He never fucking did, when he didn’t have to.

They sat in silence for a while. The evening shadows deepened. A stout old dog moseyed out from the sideway. He looked hassled, weary, his fleshy haunches rolling as he wandered towards them, whiskers twitching.

“Buona sera?” Nicky offered. 

The dog seemed to raise a skeptical eyebrow.

“Buenas noches,” Nicky amended, and the dog ambled the rest of the way over.

She stiffened momentarily when he placed his chin on her knee, but then he looked soul-deep into her eyes and groaned. _I know exactly how you feel._ She placed her palm on the warmth of the dog’s flank, and they shared a moment’s sighing grace. _Never name the moment for happiness or it’ll pass by_. Then the dog lay down at their feet and rested his drooly chin atop Nicky’s battered leather boot. Joe laughed quietly, bending over to scratch between the dog’s ears.

“Don’t get attached,” she cautioned.

“Nah, this guy’s wearing a collar,” Joe said. “I think he’s just being sociable.”

Nicky was singing quietly to himself—an American pop song, 1960s— _well it’s been building up inside of me for oh I don’t know how long_ —and the dog came in to moan softly and tunefully, in perfect counterpoint with him.

She and Joe both roared with laughter.

“The fucking Beach Boys—how’s that for an evening duet?” Joe exclaimed.

Nicky seemed pleased as well. He dropped down an octave, giving the dog more room to carry the melody. _I don’t know why but I keep thinking something’s bound to go wrong—_

There came a sharp whistle from across the plaza, and the old dog lumbered to his feet. He wagged his tail at them and appeared to grin, then marched off to rejoin his owner.

She found herself oddly cheered by the encounter. 

“We’ve taken a room at a very nice hotel,” Joe said. “Come back with us. I bet you’re staying in some shitty little pension, pallet on the floor, running on vodka fumes.”

“…Fine,” she agreed. 

The hotel _was_ very nice: Joe and Nicky had something they called “taste,” when circumstances allowed them to exercise it _._ She sprawled across the massive bed while Joe picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. He had a long Socratic debate with the person on the other end which after a certain period of time resulted in the arrival of dinner and an enormous bottle of wine. The bottle had an odd label with a picture of a black lizard. Not what she would have chosen herself, but the taste was not unlovely.

She drank most of the wine and ate little of the food. Joe and Nicky were talking quietly. Her eyes followed the arc of Joe’s hand as he gestured to make a point; the gold hoops in Nicky’s ears glinted as he nodded agreement. She wasn’t really listening. The more wine she drank, the deeper she sank into the old tristesse. In her darker moments, she used to wonder if Yusuf and Nicolò wouldn’t be better off without her. But every time she tried to disappear, they found her again. Maybe the tether that bound the three of them together was stronger than she thought, or maybe she simply wasn’t trying hard enough to lose them. So she stopped trying. What was the point?

And then Booker had come along, Booker who seemed to be in a condition of perpetual disbelief about the world. As in, _what the hell are you going to throw at me next?_ He evened their numbers, but he couldn’t fix what was broken in them or in himself. So she made him her accomplice. He didn’t know her like Yusuf and Nicolò did, and she hoped he never would.

She’d finished the bottle of wine. She switched to vodka and perceived that Joe and Nicky were looking on with vague disapproval.

“What?” she demanded.

“I was thinking about that night outside Samarkand,” Joe said unexpectedly.

“What night outside Samarkand?”

“The four of us hadn’t been together long—early thirteenth century, I think?” Joe leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head. “Remember how dark it was in that tent? You couldn’t see your hand six inches in front of your face. I’d crawled down into the bedroll to blow Nico, and we thought we were being really fucking subtle about it, too, waiting till you and Quynh were asleep. And I had him close, I could feel his cock jumping on my tongue, like he was moments away from spilling down my throat—”

“Joe!” Nicky interjected.

Joe grinned. “But we must’ve shifted around in the dark, more than we’d realized, because right when Nico was about to come, he flung out his arm and grabbed Quynh’s breast by accident. Now do you remember, Andy?”

She cackled in spite of herself. “I do, yeah. Me and Quynh thought the two of you had finally started to loosen up a little, that you’d gotten over yourselves enough to… _experiment_. Though in hindsight that would’ve been a pretty bold opening salvo from Father Nicolò here.”

Yusuf and Nicolò had guarded their relationship jealously in the early years. They seemed to believe that what they shared was unique. Special. Private _._ Yusuf said love was too small a word to describe what the two of them had spent over a century building with blood and sweat and toil, the blooming of opposites into a magnificent but undeniably thorny rose. _Beyond measure and reason, I love him. I love, love, love him._ She and Quynh, with millennia between them, had scoffed at these earnest declarations. Now she felt only regret that they had never managed the simple words that flowed so generously between Yusuf and Nicolò.

“I was mortified.” The corner of Nicky’s lip twitched. “I couldn’t look either of you in the eye for days.”

“As I recall, it took several decades more before we were ready to, ah, take a franker interest in your activities,” Joe added.

She smirked and drank deeply from the bottle.

“Those nights with you and Quynh—they reminded me of when I was very young and sneaking off by myself to read from the Song of Songs. It felt so illicit to read about all that flesh, breasts like fawns, necks like ivory towers, in the pages of the Holy Book,” Nicky said. 

“That’s Christian erotica for you.” Joe snorted. “Confusing and vaguely insulting at the same time.”

Nicky swatted Joe’s knee and continued: “The priests used to say the Song was about the love between Christ and Church, but even at twelve, thirteen, I never entirely believed them. _Like an apple among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste._ How terribly arousing, no? Especially when read in secret.” He looked at her with mischief in his eyes. “Watching you and Quynh together—who were in turn watching Yusuf and me together—it recaptured, for me, some of that feeling, the pleasure as well as the sense of forbiddenness.”

Joe leaned over and kissed him. She watched their jawbones work slowly and devoutly. For her part, she remembered something more like brinkmanship. Rivalry. Marathons and sprints. Hurdles. Relay races. Discus throws and shot-puts. Elbows and angles, fancy footwork. Competition. She and Quynh had taught the men how to be shameless, but Yusuf and Nicolò were better at inhabiting the quiet spaces. They disappeared into each other.

“Are you coming on to me?” she asked.

Their mouths separated with a pop.

“No,” said Joe. “But we are offering.”

Joe and Nicolò, Yusuf and Nicky. Maybe her memory wasn’t a graveyard after all, she thought. Maybe it actually resembled a late-night reveler who’d had a few too many drinks: hard as it tried, it just could not follow a straight line. It staggered through a maze of inversions, moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether. 

“You go ahead,” she told them, rolling over to the far side of the bed with her vodka. “I’ll watch.”

“That would… make you happy?” Joe said uncertainly.

“I like watching you fuck. It’s cheaper than the pay-per-view.”

A sharp bark of laughter from Joe. Nicky stood up from his chair and switched on the radio. Something low and staticky, the sibilant hiss of Andaluz voices crooning over Spanish guitars. Then Joe stood too, grabbing Nicky’s hand and whirling him into a mad caper that was much too fast for the song. Nicky laughed, a rare, lovely sound. He twined his arms around Joe’s neck and slowed them until they were swaying in rhythm with the guitars.

How beautiful they were together—it gave her the sense of an ache. Almost impalpable but always there.

“Andromache, dance with us,” Nicky said.

“Nuh-uh, no fucking way.”

Joe was eyeing her over Nicky’s shoulder. His smile was high and piratical. He let go of Nicky and took a step towards the bed.

“Don’t you _dare_ —”

Joe pounced.

She could’ve fought him off, but she didn’t. She let him scoop her up from the bed and toss her over his shoulder. She hammered her fists against his back, laughing helplessly as she dangled upside-down. “Let me go, you bastard!” she bellowed, but Joe paid her no mind. He carried her over to Nicky and set her down between them. She was still clutching her fucking vodka bottle, so she held it to Joe’s mouth, then Nicky’s, and polished off the final drops herself before she leaned back against Nicky’s chest and placed her hands on Joe’s shoulders.

They were both good dancers. Joe was the more exuberant of the two, spinning them in wide giddy circles; Nicky moved like water. There were powerful sentimental forces at work, or else she’d never have let them draw her into their rhythm. Soon she was moving of her own accord. Spinning and swaying, laughing until she had to stop and hold her ribs. She didn’t know where all this lightness was coming from. She draped herself against Nicky and let Joe steer them with a hand at her waist, a hand at Nicky’s, and trusted Nicky would keep them from careening out of orbit when the music sped up. Her feet left the ground. She turned round and round in their arms.

When they finally collapsed on the bed in a tangle of limbs, all three of them were breathless with exertion. Joe and Nicky were half in their clothes and half out of them. Nicky’s hands were busy under Joe’s shirt, stroking his back, while Joe groped Nicky’s ass through his jeans.

“Animals,” she said, without any real rancor.

The two of them stilled, exchanged a glance, and Joe opened an arm to her. “Do you want us to touch you?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I’ll feel anything,” she answered honestly; half the time she didn’t, these days.

“Would you like for us to try?” Nicky asked.

“It probably won’t work.”

“Sounds like a gauntlet,” said Joe, which made her laugh.

“You wanna put money on it, then?”

“Some things you can’t put a price on,” Joe replied, impish, waggling his fingers at her. “Just ask Nico.”

She looked at Nicky, eyebrows raised; Nicky only smiled.

“Oh, go on then,” she said. She detected a faint tremor in her voice, and it displeased her. She shimmed out of her jeans and sat back, knees falling open.

Nicky arranged himself behind her, guiding her head to rest on his shoulder as Joe slipped his hand beneath her underwear. He pressed his large callused palm against her and held it there for a moment without moving, just letting her get used to the feel of him, the strength and warmth of his touch. Then he moved his fingers slowly, finding the wetness that was gathering there, rubbing back and forth. When he curled a finger inside her, she rocked against his hand and urged him on.

Joe’s forehead crinkled and he made a thoughtful noise. “When I put my finger there, you have a slight—… I don’t know, a startle in the eye, perhaps? A little surprise?”

“There’s no _surprise_ ,” she said tartly, and Nicky’s chuckle was a warm puff of air against her cheek. “I’ve been touched there for thousands of years, you moron.”

The only surprise, she refrained from telling him, was how good it felt. To be touched by someone who was neither herself nor a stranger, but a loved one, even if the desire didn’t line up quite right.

Joe circled his thumb, making her gasp and clutch the sheet. Nicky caught her hand in a firm, reassuring grip.

“Can I give you head?” he asked. Matter-of-fact in the way that only Nicky could be.

She reached back to caress his jaw, felt the slight roughness there.

“Shall I shave first?” he said.

“Don’t be stupid. If you’re gonna do it just do it.”

Joe and Nicky exchanged places, and Nicky lowered himself between her legs. She had to spread them wide to accommodate the breadth of his shoulders. He didn’t tease, just pulled her underwear aside and went straight to work. She turned to Joe, about to demand if Nicky was this stingy with foreplay when he ate _him_ out, but then Nicky did something with his tongue and she swore loudly several languages, half-astonished that he’d struck fire. A chasm opened inside her, molten and devouring.

Helpless, she sagged against Joe’s chest, and he wrapped her in his arms. She trembled and shook between them.

“Close your eyes,” Joe urged. “It’s okay. You can pretend. Nicolò won’t be offended.”

Nicky hummed affirmatively; the vibration of it rolled through her body.

“Pretend—?” she rasped.

“That Quynh is here, too,” Joe said.

The night fractured and folded in. Her eyes burned and she closed them against the sudden salty swell. For a moment she floundered. Then the past rose up to embrace her. Quynh would not take her time or be careful, so she sank her fingers into Nicky’s thick hair and tugged him closer, grinding against his face. He followed her lead. There were times when she and Quynh couldn’t get enough of each other. When they were tired and sore but neither of them cared because they both wanted the ache. Quynh’s weight on top of her, under her. Nearby Yusuf and Nicolò would be making love too and every so often she’d lock eyes with one of them or the other and something would pass between them. Quynh’s mouth was like a furnace. Her pelvis rose up from the bed as if seeking something in the air, and she said Quynh’s name. She could hear far-off voices, music echoing like psalms in a cathedral: _well it’s been building up inside of me for oh I don’t know how long…_

She surfaced by degrees. At first she couldn’t recall where she was, or when. Joe and Nicky were there, flanking her on either side like a pair of guardian angels.

Joe pressed a kiss to her cheek.

“We love you,” he said.

“Oh fuck off,” she replied.

She watched them strip down to have sex. After eight hundred years she was well-accustomed to the sight, the angles and planes of their bodies eminently familiar to her—Yusuf, so replete in his strength and his vigor, all his muscles bunching and cording to this singular purpose; Nicolò, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, lithe and somehow dangerous to behold—… But there was always an element of transformation when they came together. A something-more. When Joe put his mouth on Nicky, Nicky’s feet pointed like a dancer’s and his toes curled. Joe trapped Nicky’s hips with his forearm as he began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea. She averted her eyes just before Nicky came, suddenly unwilling to trespass on that particular intimacy. When she looked back at them, their positions were reversed, and now it was Joe writhing against the bed while Nicky sucked him off. The air was thick with the musk of sex.

She left them to it and closed herself in the bathroom. She used the toilet and washed her hands with soap that smelled faintly of sandalwood, dodging her reflection’s eyes in the mirror. The window was open, and off in the distance a church bell clanged the somber notes of the hour, the half-hour, the quarter: they still laid it on thick in this part of the world. Mars was a dull fire in the eastern sky, and the sphere of the night turned in its tiny increments.

Joe and Nicky had finished by the time she left the bathroom. Joe was curled into Nicky’s side, head resting on his chest while Nicky stroked his hair. The taut lines of their bodies had relaxed into unselfconscious languor; they were both obviously done in for the night. Amused by their debility, she commented, “I’ve always wondered why you can’t recover any faster from _this_ —funny, isn’t it, that your refractory period isn’t part of the immortal healing package?”

Nicky slid one eye halfway open. “Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg,” he murmured. “Miracles, in other words, only go so far.” 

Joe made a low, disgruntled sound and pressed closer, hiding his face in Nicky’s neck. 

“Andy, come to bed,” Nicky said.

They had left plenty of space for her, but she merely untangled the sheet and pulled it over them. Spanish nights were too cold to sleep bare. Then she sank into one of the armchairs. She knew there would be no sleep for her tonight. She might close her eyes and see Quynh. Quynh and Andromache and Nicolò and Yusuf as they had been long ago, before the tide went out.

She would never lose the feeling of the love the four of them had had together, nor the nausea of its absence. Love was so very hard to do nowadays, it wasn’t like it used to be. Maybe she would wake up one day a hundred years from now and the ache would be gone, but she doubted it.

It was like Nicky had said.

Miracles only went so far.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! To the wonderful respondents on previous stories of mine who requested more Andy, I hope this does the trick--trying to get inside the head of someone 6000 years old is something of a trip, to say the least. 
> 
> I love to hear from you!


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